Camera Roll Highlights 2022

I’ve been posting my old photos that I’ve had tagged as possible painting inspiration but had not gotten around to painting. (See also: 2024, 2023.) These include photos I considered not technically good enough as photographs to go on my Unsplash, but still with some seed of interest or inspiration. You are free to paint these, or I may come back to them someday!

Below, find 37 photos from 2022.

Read more

Monthly Retrospective: May 2025

This month, I painted small, in keeping with my desire to make things manageable. My outdoor paintings were painted on a 3.5″x5″ Moleskin pocket sketchbook; my studio paintings this month were painted on my Cheap Joe’s going-out-of-business stock of 6″ square Kilimanjaro paper. Outdoor Paintings Thanks to Lynne for getting me to go to to … Read more

My Urban Sketching Kit as of Spring 2025

Earlier this year, when I decided to get more serious about urban sketching, I put together a small kit based on my expectations of what would work well. Now that I have some experience, let’s judge how I did! With particular emphasis on critiquing my palette choices, since they are what I obsess about the most.

Color Substitutions for Claire Giordano’s Beginner Watercolor Course

Edit: This post has been edited on June 7, 2025 to include more information about pans vs tubes and photos of student-grade Cotman substitutions.

I’m a member of Claire Giordano’s Adventure Art Academy, and I’m joining her Beginner/Foundations class starting June 12. Although a person who’s painted for four years and maintained a three-update-a-week watercolor blog for three of those years can probably not exactly be called a beginner, I still feel like a beginner in many ways – good and bad! When you’re chaotically self-taught, it’s always good to circle back to fundamentals, and my recent feelings of slump have had me yearning for structure and simplicity. I always learn a lot from Claire’s tips on water control, plein air shortcuts, and specific landscape elements, such as alpenglow.

The one aspect of painting where I don’t feel like a beginner is color mixing and pigment knowledge. Learning about pigments and paint options almost feels like a separate hobby, one where I’ve really dug in. I’d like to put that knowledge to work for my fellow students. 

Read more

The Problems of Plein Air

I have currently on a mission to become a legit urban sketcher! For a lot of reasons, but mostly because I want to capture the things I see on my travels, and I want to do so without suffering from a bad case of impostor syndrome.

Artist Palette Profiles: Kazuo Kasai

Kazuo Kasai is one of my favorite contemporary watercolor artists to follow on Instagram (before I left Instagram), and he has amazing timelapse videos on Youtube. Even accounting for the sped-up video, he paints so fast, slapping down paint as if at random, yet it all comes together. I love his fresh, bold color and the way his paintings are so intensely seasonal: spring bursting with blossoms; summer full of sunlight and greenery; autumn exploding with fall color; and winter cold and serene. 

Read more

May greens keep changing!

I’ve often struggled to find the “perfect spring green” and this year, I think I figured out the secret: there is no perfect spring green because spring greens keep changing!

Read more

News: Goodbye Joann’s; the No-Blick Challenge

[Edited with new details Friday, May 23, 2025, at 6:30 AM EST. Thanks to the Mysterious V for important leads.] Joann’s Fabric has closed its doors, the end of an era. Despite getting some deep discounts on fabric and craft supplies last weekend, my partner, who sews, remains despondent: where to shop now? This is … Read more